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Skeleton's Tooth
Skeleton's Tooth is an unreleased song by the Mountain Goats. Lyrics I see the shadows of the prophets in the parapets Truly they have their reward Trade you a map of the castle grounds For some proof that you got past the guards There’s dried blood on the wrought iron gates Spies in the tower I crawled up from the dungeon last night Under my own power Spit blood at the sidewalk Try to stay out of the headlines Scan the guts of fresh roadkill Looking for bad signs Stay safe in the shadows I know the real truth Better a mouth full of bloody gums Than a skeleton’s tooth I hear the howling of the helpless in the surface noise Scratch out their names in the dirt Trade you some tales from a vanished cave For an invisibility shirt Recall the proverb of the prodigal son Not sure who it applies to Threats of my enemies run loose in my head The way that lullabies do Take the road where it leads me I should probably know better Just up ahead see the shining sign Of the debt collector Sleep and peace is ending All through the night Skeleton’s tooth gleaming down in the darkness All fine and bright Once I walked in splendor Back in the world of my youth Better to bury all the better days Than a skeleton’s tooth Comments by John Darnielle About this Song *"The way that I work after I become a parent is either wait till the kids are out of the house or incorporate them into the work. If you’d heard any of the demos from the last album -- which you did not -- you would hear my son introducing all of them. We had a script that we would run. I’d say, you know, all right, buddy! You ready to demo this jam? And he would say, yes! And I would say, why don’t you press that beat button, because I was working on a keyboard that had preset rhythms, because we sent them to my drummer, I want to give him some idea of the rhythm I had in mind, so he’d press the beat button and we would go. And that was the case when he was 3, when I writing Goths, and it’s still the case today. And on a Saturday morning two weeks ago I think, I woke up and he said he wanted to demo a jam because that has become the terminology, right? I didn’t have a new jam, but I went to the piano, and I said, okay, buddy, let’s demo this jam, what’s it called? And he said, Skeleton Tooth. I don’t know where he got that from but I have to assume it’s from being around me. But I said okay, cool! And we started playing, I played a G and then I augmented it and then I messed around, and then as happens at some point I said to his mom, hey, I’m getting somewhere, if you could distract the children for about twenty minutes while I finish this? This is called Skeleton Tooth." -- Things Referenced in this Song Live Shows this Song Was Played at *2018-10-24 - Symphony Space - New York, NY Category:Unreleased songs